Towards an adaptable framework for mobility assistive technologies

Abstract

This study approaches adaptability for mobility assistive technologies by proposing an adaptable framework for mobility assistive technologies, inspired by ACT-R, the desiderata for developing cognitive architectures as highlighted by R. Sun and Vernon et al. and human behaviour. This study proposes an adaptable framework for shared control and autonomous mobility as the first step towards the formation of a comprehensive adaptive framework. This study proposes a minimalist four-module adaptive framework consisting of the perception/motor module, the cognitive module, the memory module, and the action module. The minimum requirements for the implementation of this framework on an intelligent wheelchair for shared/collaborative control were highlighted. Although an overview of the proposed adaptive framework for mobility assistive technologies was presented, there are still numerous concerns to address. One of the main issues remains the most suitable connectionist and symbolic process to be used in the hybrid framework, which will be investigated in future work. In addition, it is still essential to resolve details of the adaptation/learning process in the framework, so it will be necessary to develop learning mechanisms in cooperation with reward systems as well as observation/inference systems for the framework.